the AFR snatches the WYYY engineer — "Hence the new millennium’s passion for…"
Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, ‘spect-ops,’ the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching. […] The fellowship and anonymous communion of being part of a watching crowd, a mass of eyes all not at home, all out in the world and pointed the same way.
Context
The famous spect-op passage is the compensatory swing of the private-spectation pendulum: having watched everything alone behind curtains, the population develops a "passion for standing live witness," a hunger to be a mass of eyes all pointed the same way. The pathos is that the cure is more spectation — the vacuum of solitary watching filled not by contact or action but by watching together, communion reduced to the shared vector of a stare at a drained duck pond or a splattered W.D.V. The crowds collect "by an almost seemingly nucleic force," which is the tell: these are not participants, they are spectators magnetized to any live thing, an appetite so undiscriminating it will one day accept a single cartridge as the ultimate live thing to watch.